Get on your knees, Oklahoma City. It’s time to worship our generous oligarchs!

Yesterday afternoon, city leaders and an eager-to-please local media gathered at the future home of Scissortail Park to announce everyone’s favorite truck stop moguls – the Love’s family – are “gifting” approximately .0002% of their net worth to fund maintenance and support stage productions at Scissor Tail Park.

Instead of linking to one of the numerous local media articles about the gift, let’s go straight to the source:

The Stage and Great Lawn at Scissortail Park, scheduled to open this fall in Oklahoma City, will be named the Love’s Travel Stops Stage and Great Lawn in recognition of a major gift from the Love Family. The $2 million gift will fund ongoing maintenance of the park and support stage productions in the future.

The six-acre Love’s Travel Stops Stage and Great Lawn is a first-class outdoor performance venue and features a prominent stage with green room and capacity for small (up to 1,500 guests), medium (up to 10,000 guests) and large (up to 15,000 guests) events, including concerts, outdoor movies, corporate events and symphonic performances.

Wait a second. If it’s a “gift” from the Love family, why do we have to name the park’s main stage after their chain of truck stops? It almost feels like they’re buying naming rights to the facilities as part of an advertising deal but framing it as a gift so they can also get the positive PR and media attention that comes with…

Hahaha. Just kidding. I’m a stereotypical Oklahoman, which means I’m very grateful that this generous family that earns more in one hour than you’ll likely earn in a lifetime generously donated a day’s worth of profits from their chain of over 470 “travel centers” to have their name plastered all over the taxpayer-funded park, giving the uninformed the impression they funded the entire thing.

Here’s a photo from the big unveil:

There’s been a complete organ shutdown at OU! Surprisingly, we’re not talking about OU Medical Center, but OU the currently controversy assailed institution!

You may have heard the University of Oklahoma has announced it’s closing the American Organ Institute and shutting down the – oxymoron alert – organ technology program. In case you weren’t aware, you’re not on another adventure with Doc Brown. It’s 2019.

I mean, seriously, if I hadn’t read about this with my own eyes I would’ve sworn that someone was screwing with me.

According to Channel 4, there are six students who major in organ technology and 17 who take organ technology courses for their major in pipe organ music. Clearly, this is a massively popular field to be heading into, and I shudder at the prospect of them having to instead study the Casio keyboard.

Then again, this institution has provided some of the most prolific instrumentalists of all time. Before we write off this sacred place of knowledge, let’s acknowledge some of these heroes of the organ world…

I never try to use my space here or on social media to talk about some dumb thing on Netflix that I watched, but I had to listen to all of you rave, and then eventually moan, about The Games of the Thorns for nearly this entire decade, so for once you can listen to me. I watched that new Martin Scorsese documentary about the Rolling Thunder Revue, which was Bob Dylan’s crazy and ill-advised tour in 1975/76 after his album ‘Desire.’ The doc has some amazing behind-the-scenes and interview footage, not to mention incredible performances. But most interestingly, there’s a lot of made-up bullshit, including people who are interviewed who are completely fabricated, and stories that have no basis in reality. Watch it first before you read about those aspects, but it’s almost refreshing to be reminded that so much of what you see and read is bald-faced fiction.

Speaking of which, here is last weekend’s totally real and reliable news: